Music Blog

Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl": Local Performer Makes it Gayer

The song's been bouncing around Kyla Louise Webb's head ever since she heard the damn thing in 2008. Katy's Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" -- the national anthem of frivolous lady makeouts -- just wasn't...that gay at all.

"I always thought that line in the song is ridiculous: 'I hope my boyfriend don't mind it,'" says Webb, a St. Louis local who performs as the Charlie Chaplin-esque Sammy Tramp in the neo-vaudevillian touring show, the Beggar's Carnivale.

"On one hand it was great that this attractive woman was saying it was OK, but on the other hand she was really shooting everyone in the foot by saying, 'I only kiss girls when I'm drunk in a bar. And then I go home to my boyfriend.'"

So what's a proud lesbian, neo-vaudevillian songwriter like Webb to do? Write gayer song lyrics, obviously.

The result of Webb's tinkering is a YouTube video, "Gaying up, 'I Kissed A Girl,' (Matching Haircuts)." It starts off with Webb introducing herself and her problems with Perry. Webb starts strumming around the 1:20 mark.

Webb says the tune has been a hit in front of her live audiences. The reaction surprised her at first, she says, considering most people come to her shows for a taste of the glory days of vaudeville.

"The song came out like five or six years ago at this point, and then it was even more taboo," she says of Perry's hit. "Because it's amazing a how society has advanced since then. But even now, for the people in pop culture that are gay and out, they are still not allowed to be that gay."

Webb's video isn't completely focused on Perry. After a few minutes of sufficiently gayed-up lyrics ("I kissed a girl and I liked it, so we watched college basketball"), she appears to have a musical epiphany and pivots to a slow country ballad that'll hit you right in your honky-tonk heart.

Continue to page two.

The country song -- "Matching Haircuts" -- isn't finished yet, says Webb. She hopes to have it ready by the time she performs at the Show Me Burlesque festival in May.

It's worth noting that Webb isn't the first queer performer to take Perry to task for "I Kissed a Girl." In 2008, Amanda Palmer and Margaret Cho bound and gagged a Perry look-alike during a few concerts as a protest against California's Prop 8.